A pair of unusual twentieth-century literary collaborations claims my
attention here, linked by a ghostly figure who lived and wrote some 400
years before either of his collaborators. In each of these cases, the
collaborative endeavor has at its center a question of identity, and in
these pages I will be tracing such questions along what Susan Stanford
Friedman has described as the "geopolitical axis" of identity, a spatial
dimension of difference that "inflects or mediates any given cultural
identity or praxis" (109). The first collaboration I take up here is
that between W. B. Yeats and Leo Africanus in Yeats's prose manuscript
titled simply "Leo Africanus," the beginnings of which date from around
1915. The heavily revised manuscript takes the form of an exchange of
letters between the twentieth-century poet and the early
sixteenth-century figure of Leo Africanus, in which the latter asks
Yeats to write to him "as if to Africa" and responds to the poet's
concerns about writing, spirituality, and identity. The second
collaboration takes place between Leo Africanus and Amin Maalouf, who in
1986 published a fictional autobiography of Leo in French (translated
into English in 1988). Maalouf gives voice to Leo Africanus in the form
of an autodiegetic narrative, though Leo Africanus himself composed a
first-person narrative of his travels in A Geographical Historie of
Africa (trans. John Pory in 1600).

In neither of these collaborative projects does Leo Africanus actually
put pen to paper, rendering his agency in these writing projects
ghostly. In Yeats's "Leo Africanus," the authority and legitimacy of Leo
as Yeats's interlocutor are precisely at stake in the discussion,
despite the fact that it is Leo's voice (channeled through a psychic
medium) that commands Yeats to write in the first place. At the end of
the manuscript, Yeats concludes, "I am not convinced that in this letter
there is one sentence that has come from beyond my own imagination"
(38); insofar as Leo has helped him, he determines, it is merely to
"arrange" his thoughts. In his final words, Yeats decides that while Leo
"cannot write & speak [he] can always listen" to the poet (39). That
Yeats denies the legitimacy of the lengthy letters attributed to Leo in
the manuscript works to achieve two effects: it shores up Yeats's
position as author, and relegates Leo to the realm of images
appropriable by the poet. It is no accident that critics have been
interested in the manuscript almost exclusively to the extent that it
offers insight into the genesis of Yeats's theory of the mask as
antiself developed in "Ego Dominus Tuus," in Per Amica Silentia Lunae,
and ultimately in A Vision. After all, the rhetorical parting
shot of the dialogue leaves the author alone to claim his own primacy as
composer of the conversation and as theorist of matters of spiritual and
imaginative significance.

Yeats's position might indeed seem simply a matter of common sense - who
else could have written these words, after all? It is worth remembering,
however, that the voice of Leo initiates the conversation, and the
manuscript begins by treating the figure of Leo as though he has a real,
instrumental agency in the exchange: "If you Africanus, can materialize,
or half materialize a body & at some point of space . . . move & speak,
& carry solid objects, we have the same evidence, for a separate mind,
that I have for my own mind" (25). The text ends, however, by
celebrating Yeats's imagination, the imagistic plenitude of which Leo
himself appears to become a part: with some regret, Leo points out at
the close of his last letter that "your mind has grown curiously, so
full [of] shining images of all kinds, that you have become almost
incapable of hearing & seeing us" (37). When Yeats determines that
finally Leo's "mission was to create solitude" (39) for the poet, Leo
can be understood to suffer from the sort of attenuation marked in
Yeats's poem "Byzantium," in which "an image, man or shade" becomes
"Shade more than man, more image than a shade," while Yeats becomes the
solitary author both of "Leo Africanus" as text and of Leo Africanus as
image.

By contrast, Amin Maalouf, whose recent work represents a plea for
cosmopolitanism and the acceptance of the multiple allegiances of
contemporary identities, renders this attenuated image of Leo more
robust by recuperating his voice in the novel Leo Africanus. The
collaboration between Maalouf and Leo finds the novelist returning to
A Geographical Historie of Africa
and to its attendant historical contexts in order to cultivate a sense
of Leo's most intimate speech and thought. In this sense, Leo serves as
a kind of ghost-writer of the narrative that bears his name, and
Maalouf's turn to Leo's writing and history in fact challenges Yeats's
occlusion of Leo's contribution to the earlier join production.
Maalouf's novel has Yeats's work distinctly in mind, taking as its
epigraph a line from the "Leo Africanus" manuscript, and the
collaboration between Maalouf and Leo Africanus, in which the former
builds upon the writing and life narrative of the latter, accomplishes
several things in relation to that earlier dialogue. In the first place
it counters the notion that Leo "cannot write & speak," allowing Leo to
tell his story comprehensively, and ranging across the closing years of
the fifteenth century and his ancestral home in Granada to the 1520s and
North Africa. In the second place, Maalouf reclaims Leo from the
shadowland of Yeats's world repository of images, the Spiritus Mundi.
From this inward and arcane sink of images, Maalouf calls up Leo
Africanus and makes his image one that crosses political and cultural
borders. The line from Yeats's manuscript on which Maalouf settles for
his epigraph is a significant one in this respect: "Yet do not doubt
that I was also Leo Africanus the traveller." If Leo appears as a figure
out of Spiritus Mundi in Yeats's manuscript, his is an image accessible
to the world; but Maalouf turns Leo into an image of global movement -
of border crossing, cosmopolitanism, and itinerant translocality. The
difference between these two pieces of collaborative writing, in other
words, might be described as a struggle over Leo as a global image:
where Yeats fixes Leo within an aesthetic system, Maalouf holds him up
as a model for global traveling cultures that crosscut cultural and
imperial boundaries.

The traveler's identity of the ghostly Leo Africanus opens up questions
of global territoriality not only in Maalouf's novel, but in Yeats's
poetry. For where Yeats tends to turn inward, toward transhistorical
repositories of world images, Leo moves outward as he traverses
geopolitical boundaries and diverse sociocultural landscapes. In light
of Maalouf's reinvestment of the figure of Leo with a historical and
geopolitical voice, it becomes possible to see in Yeats's manuscript the
images of Leo Africanus and his Africa haunting the spaces between
Yeats's rootedness - the territoriality of his poetry - and his
route-work, the countervailing imagistic tendency that, for instance,
finds central figures in his poetry slouching toward Bethlehem, sailing
to Byzantium, or flying over Europe ("The Second Coming"; "Sailing to
Byzantium"; "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"). Yeats's "Leo
Africanus" manuscript treats the historical Leo - variously slave trader
and slave, explorer and colonial cartographer, colonized and hybridized
subject, world-traveler and provincial African - as an emanation of
Spiritus Mundi, or world-spirit, but simultaneously enframes Leo within
a Western territorial tropography. I suggest that the persistence of the
alien image of Leo - his very haunting of Yeats - heralds a
deterritorialized global as a cultural emergent arising within the
interstices - and in excess - of the older empires through Leo's nomadic
"route work," a kind of work about which Yeats remains ambivalent, but
which Maalouf has embraced in his most recent writing (see On
Identity).

* * *

Yeats's encounter with Leo and Africa begins in the realm of Yeats's
private investigations - that is, in the arcane world of spiritualism to
which, Edward Said claims, Yeats has recourse to escape or resolve the
tensions between his Irish nationalism and his allegiance to English
cultural heritage (80). Yeats met with Africa in the figure of Leo
Africanus, the sixteenth-century North African poet, commercial
traveler, and explorer, who communicated with Yeats for about a decade
through mediums and then through automatic writing. In notes to a séance
held on May 3, 1909, Yeats records the voice of Leo Africanus saying to
him, "I am trying to control - I have been to you before (Africa name)"
(qtd. Adams and Harper 3), and subsequently Yeats recalled that "fifteen
or twenty years earlier" a "shade" "had whispered very faintly at my ear
words which I had thought to be 'Leonora Arguite' but the medium
declared them to be 'Leonora your guide'" ("Leo Africanus" 24). When Leo
- now clearly a masculine figure - turned up again at a sitting on May
9, 1912, Yeats was convinced that Leo Africanus was his spiritual guide,
and he speculated that "It is possible that Leo may turn out to be a
symbolic being. Leo, the constellation, the house of the sun" ("Report
of Séance" 20). On July 22, 1915, through the automatic writing of one
Miss Scatcherd, Leo Africanus enjoined Yeats to write the series of
letters that comprise the manuscript that Yeats calls simply "Leo
Africanus." Yeats records the encounter with Leo and the latter's
request in his notes as follows:

[Leo] was drawn to me because in life he had been all undoubting
impulse, all that his
name and Africa might suggest symbolically for his biography was both
symbolical and
actual. I was doubting, conscientious and timid. His contrary and by
association with me
would be made not one but two perfected natures. He asked me to write
him a letter
addressed to him as if to Africa giving all my doubts about spiritual
things and then to
write a reply as from him to me. He would control me in that reply so
that it would be
really from him. (qtd. Adams and Harper 13)

The "timid" and "doubting" poet is asked to write "as if to Africa,"
where Africa is both the symbolic avatar and literal embodiment of
"undoubting impulse." Yeats took up Leo's charge with relish and
composed the dialogue sometime in 1915, after which time Leo continued
to appear to Yeats sporadically until late 1917, when George Yeats began
her automatic writing just after the Yeatses' marriage. Leo also turned
up in George Yeats's writing, although as a hostile "frustrator" rather
than a sympathetic "guide," until March 20, 1919, when he disappeared
for good following the birth of Anne Yeats.

Fascinated by the prospect of having a spiritual double, Yeats began
research into the history of his guide, and discovered that Leo
Africanus (also known as Johannes Leo) lived between 1494 and 1552 and
was most famous as the author of the voluminous Geographical Historie
of Africa. Leo was born in Granada into a noble Moorish family that
soon found itself exiled to North Africa. Leo traveled widely in Africa
as an explorer and commercial trader before being captured by pirates
and given as a slave to Pope Leo X. The Pope discovered his merit as a
scholar and therefore awarded him a pension, simultaneously converting
him to Christianity and giving the African his own names, Johannes and
Leo. The new convert Leo Africanus wrote poems and A Geographical
Historie of Africa while at the papal court, but before his death he
returned to Africa, renounced Christianity, and assumed his Arabic name
once again.

For the late Victorians, Leo Africanus's work in his Geographical
Historie of Africa seemed to lend support to Britain's imperial
project, mapping out the landscape and cultural practices of the
continent, and the rise in demand for the Renaissance text was great
enough for the Hakluyt Society in 1896 to issue a reprint of the English
translation made in 1600 of
A Geographical Historie of Africa. Even before this reprint,
though, Leo Africanus was sufficiently well-known to the Victorians to
figure in the press as a popular image. In the Christmas 1890 number of
Punch, in a fold-out section titled "Punch Among the Planets," a cartoon
of Leo Africanus occupies the position of the constellation Leo. In this
anti-imperialist cartoon by Harry Furniss, a dark-skinned, leonine Leo
Africanus appears in imperial military dress, carrying in one hand a
folded tent labeled "Barnum," and in the other a sack labeled "Profit."
Under one arm a large tome is wedged - a Bible or perhaps a copy of A
Geographical Historie of Africa. A tag is affixed to Leo's tail,
reading "LATEST ADDITION TO THE MODISH MENAGERIE," and Leo's knees seem
to buckle under the weight of his burdens. The imperial uniform suggests
Leo's complicity with the imperial project, but the tag that marks his
status as the "latest addition to the modish menagerie" also points to
his and Africa's domination by the entrepreneurial imperialism that he
unwittingly served by mapping Africa's cultural geography. If Leo
Africanus in Furniss's cartoon is supposed to be the paradigmatic
protoimperialist, paving the way for Barnum's menagerie and for colonial
profit alike, these spoils of imperialism also represent Leo's and
Africa's burden. Leo the African becomes the "latest addition to the
modish menagerie" in the same way he became a novel kind of slave at Leo
X's court. Well before Yeats's odd acquaintance with Leo Africanus, the
figure of the fifteenth-century wanderer was rendered as an image of
ambivalence toward a form of imperial globality.

It is unlikely that Yeats knew or remembered this Punch cartoon,
however, for he saw no irony in repeatedly associating Leo Africanus
with "Leo, the constellation, the house of the sun," and the manuscript
illustrates "a method of creating a mental image" by the example of a
paper game, in which "at the head let us say might correspond to the sun
& so have a lions head to represent it, while this might be a mans body
& so on," thereby unwittingly recapitulating Punch's satiric cartoon
(37). What is more, at first Yeats found that "plainly Leo Africanus a
geographer & traveller is for me no likely guide" (23). After
discovering that his spiritual counterpart was a poet, however, Yeats
seems to have accepted the naturalness of having Leo for his guide.
Yeats owned a copy of the original Elizabethan translation of A
Geographical Historie of Africa (the manuscript makes clear that he
read it as well), through which he became aware of the kinds of
ambivalence in Leo's relationship to Africa that are expressed in
Furniss's cartoon. At the end of the first book of Leo's Geographical
Historie, for example, Leo compares himself to a "wily bird" called
Amphibia
that "could live as well with the fishes of the sea, as with the fowles
of the aire." He concludes that "Out of this fable I will inferre no
other morall, but that all men doe most affect that place, where they
finde least damage and inconvenience. For mine own part, when I heare
the Africans evill spoken of, I wil affirme my selfe to be one of
Granada: and when I perceive the nation of Granada to be discommended,
then will I professe my selfe to be an African." In this kind of
ambivalence Yeats certainly found additional evidence that Leo was an
unusually apposite figure to serve as his spiritual "double" - early in
his career, for instance, James Joyce denounced the "treacherous
instinct of adaptability" Yeats evinced in his role as aesthete ("Day of
the Rabblement" 71).

No less "amphibious" than Leo Africanus, Yeats nevertheless frequently
identified with positions through which he found much "damage and
inconvenience": Yeats's antagonism towards the English and towards
Ireland's subjection to Britain was always complicated by his pride in
his Anglo-Irishness. Yeats's ambivalence resulted in what he called his
"Anglo-Irish solitude, a solitude I have made for myself, an outlawed
solitude," and leads Seamus Deane to detect in Yeats's work traces of a
"colonialist mentality" at the same time that Declan Kiberd and Edward
Said hold up Yeats as a model of the decolonizing intellectual. The
amenability of Yeats's thought and writing to divergent contexts of
colonial complicity and decolonizing potential suggests the sort of
colonial entrapment that Harry Furniss's cartoon of Leo Africanus
dramatizes, and that serves as the mark of the "amphibian": the
ambivalently native writer whose work serves as an implicit apology (or
invitation) for colonialism finds himself caught up in the machinery of
imperialism. Yeats's "amphibiousness," resenting the English in Ireland
yet celebrating the products of that occupation as a distinctly
Anglo-Irish tradition, is perhaps best expressed in his poetry by the
detachment of "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" (1919): "Those that I
fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love; / My country is
Kiltartan Cross" (3-5). Yeats's ambivalence about racial and political
identities finds resolution here primarily through an expression of
identification with a real Irish landscape, just as Leo's ambivalence
about his Africanness appears to be resolved by Africa, the object of
his geographical study itself, with which he is subsequently identified.
Edward Said argues that decolonizing artists reinvent cartographies of
homeland and are "quite literally grounded," and Yeats's insistence upon
identification with a concrete landscape is a point to which I will
return momentarily (79).

Though Yeats and his spiritual guide Leo Africanus shared a number of
qualities and circumstances, the two soon diverge within the manuscript
called "Leo Africanus." The injunction Yeats answers in his manuscript
is, we recall, "Write as if to Africa giving all my doubts about
spiritual things," and we also recall that Leo Africanus is identified
with Africa, an Africa that Yeats says is "both symbolical and actual."
Yeats's response to Leo's command, surprisingly enough, is to call into
question both his interlocutor and the injunction itself. "How can I
feel certain of your identity[?]" Yeats asks (22). "Are you not perhaps
becoming a second Leo Africanus a shadow upon the wall, a strong
echo[?]" (27). In answer to this challenge, Leo asserts,

We [spirits] are the unconscious as you say . . . . Yet do not doubt
that I was also Leo
Africanus the traveller, for . . . I can still remember the sand, & many
Arab cities . . . .
[There is] no proof [that such] a faculty can be carried from one mind
to another like a
number or a geometrical form. (38)

Yeats replies to Leo's attempt to convince him with a statement of
profound doubt: "I am not convinced that in this letter there is one
sentence that has come from beyond my own imagination. . . . I think
there is no thought that has not occurred to me in some form or other
for many years passed; if you have influenced me it has been less[,] to
arrange my thoughts" (38-39).

The pages in which Leo Africanus attempts to answer Yeats's doubts
clarify to a degree what Africa suggests "symbolically" and "actually"
to Yeats. Symbolically, Leo as Africa appears as a product of Spiritus
Mundi, repository of world images, as Yeats called it, and Africa is to
this extent one of Yeats's others. In actual terms, Leo asserts that he
and Africa exist as discrete entities. But when Yeats comes to respond
in his own voice, what Leo and Africa "actually" suggest becomes
subordinate to what they suggest "symbolically": "I am not convinced
that in this letter there is one sentence that has come from beyond my
own imagination." In effect, Yeats answers the command, "Write as if to
Africa," by asserting that everything that Leo and Africa represent
already exists wholly within his own imagination. Though Leo maintains
that his actual existence is sovereign, arguing that the African memory
cannot be transferred to another mind like a geometric form, Yeats
asserts that his encounter with Africa serves less to modify his
thoughts than to arrange them, as a geometric form might.

The fundamental "arrangement" of thought that Yeats takes away from his
encounter with Leo and Africa assumes the "geometrical form" of a center
consolidating its power from the periphery, and what Joyce calls Yeats's
"treacherous adaptability" comes to look more like what Richard Ellmann
describes as Yeats's drive to incorporate through "eminent domain" - the
annexation of the aesthetic systems of others (3). For Yeats it seems
not to matter whether one believes in the African other to whom one
writes, since Africa enables one to become more conscious of one's own
power and to organize that power more efficiently. This is an imperious
rhetorical move on Yeats's part, but the arrangement of thought
apparently made available to Yeats by Africa is also an imperial one,
for the spatial trope of center annexing its peripheral other invokes
the terms through which imperial capitals expressed their dominion. And
yet because Yeats tends to identify with real landscapes in his
ambivalence and doubt, because Yeats throughout his career insisted upon
the real geographical specificity of Ireland, and because, as Donald
Davie and others have noted, a concrete geography fundamentally grounds
Yeats's poetry, Yeats logically cannot when asked to write "as if to
Africa" answer simply by asserting that Africa exists only in his head.

Instead, alongside Yeats's imperious arrogation of all that Leo and
Africa signify, we should bear in mind Yeats's apparent imaginative
refusal in his encounter with Leo, a correlative of his suppression of
Leo's voice. If, as Yeats asserts in his essay called "Swedenborg,
Mediums, and the Desolate Places," one must keep simultaneously in mind
both what one believes and what causes one to doubt, then beside the
imperial geometry of the consolidating center we should keep in mind the
haunting difference that peripheral Africa and the traveling Leo
represent in relation to that center. It is precisely this difference
that Maalouf champions in his novel by emphasizing Leo as a model for
what James Clifford calls "traveling cultures," a notion that emphasizes
the "translocal" as a cultural dominant and reorients our thinking away
from "relations of dwelling" and toward "relations of travel" (Clifford
7, 22). It is significant, then, that Maalouf does not present Leo
Africanus as a dweller or representative of Africa, as Yeats does, but
rather renders him in perpetual motion. Here the key metaphor is the
flux of the sea, rather than the territoriality of Yeats's "eminent
domain": in Maalouf's book, Leo observes that "God did not ordain that
my destiny should be written completely in a single book, but that it
should unfold, wave after wave, to the rhythm of the seas. At each
crossing, destiny jettisoned the ballast of one future to endow me with
another; on each new shore, it attached to my name the name of a
homeland left behind" (81).

Even those territorial spaces of dwelling - villages and cities - Leo
encounters in Maalouf's novel are shaped fundamentally by traveling
cultures: as one tribal spokesman says to Leo,"We alone are privileged:
we see passing through our villages the people of Fez, of Numidia, of
the land of the Blacks, merchants, notables, students or ulama; they
each bring us a piece of gold, or a garment, a book to read or copy, or
perhaps only a story, an anecdote, a word; thus, with the passing of the
caravans we accumulate riches and knowledge in the shelter of these
inaccessible mountains which we share with the eagles, the crows and the
lions, our companions in dignity" (Leo Africanus 156-57). The
city or village thus appears as neither a central nor a peripheral space
but as a node in a network that traverses geopolitical and sociocultural
frontiers, and it is the translocal movement and interimperial travel
along this network that Leo Africanus's narrative is designed to
illustrate. Maalouf's novel concludes with the following imperatives:
"When men's minds seem narrow to you, tell yourself that the land of God
is broad; broad His hands and broad His heart. Never hesitate to go far
away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs" (360).
Maalouf's conclusion renders the image of Leo Africanus not only
cosmopolitan, but one that works against the territorial rhetoric that
characterizes Yeats's narrative.

* * *

Yeats's writing forms part of larger movements in aesthetic modernism
that arose in the period that Roland Robertson characterizes as
globalization's "crucial take-off period," the half-century running from
1870 to 1925 (52). The "Leo Africanus" manuscript falls broadly within
formalist definitions of modernism, insofar as Yeats cultivates a prose
style that resists the transparency of enlightenment discourses: "I am
be[ing] careful to keep my [style] broken, & even abrupt believing that
I could but keep myself sensitive to influence by avoiding those trains
of argument & deduction which run on railway tracks" (39). To this
extent, both the modernism of which Yeats's writing generally forms a
part and the processes of cultural globalization can be understood to
rise from within the world empires that also reached their fullest
extent in the period. Under this reading, a new sense of globality as a
cultural emergent in many ways appears congruent with the trajectories
of these empires, and from within the British Empire's metropolitan
center, of course, imperial aspirations were often elided with a global
totality. Immanuel Wallerstein's "structural positions in a
world-economy" - core, periphery, and semi-periphery - recapitulate the
metaphorics of empire as a Copernican galaxy, with the imperial
satellite territories orbiting Britain as the central star.

We would be mistaken, however, to think of such central points in an
imperial or global constellation as simply radiant, however. For while
global expansion generates a centrifugal movement from a particular
center, like Yeats's exercise of "eminent domain" it also concentrates
capital and political and cultural power in discrete points. Yet the
enrichment of these global nodes in this way also renders them, in Ian
Baucom's phrase, "the scenes of the haunting return of difference"
(162), a difference both temporal and spatial. Inasmuch as the global
arises within the interstices and in ambivalent excess of these empires,
it reflects such peripatetic hauntings and returns of difference as Leo
Africanus - the man of the world and the global image - represents in
Yeats's manuscript. It is a significant consequence of Amin Maalouf's
collaboration with Leo Africanus that we can see both the assertion of
the imperial sovereignty of the modernist author in Yeats's
collaboration with Leo, and the way in which Leo's ghostly presence in
the manuscript marks the opening of deterritorialized networks traversed
by translocal and interimperial figures such as Leo Africanus the
traveler, explorer, and nomad.